Details of U.S. victory are a little premature

On the frigid night of Dec. 24, 1979, Soviet airborne forces seized Kabul
airport. Elite Alpha Group commandos sped to the presidential palace, burst
into the bedroom of Afghan President Hafizullah Amin and gunned him down.
Columns of Soviet armour crossed the border and raced south toward Kabul.

It took Soviet forces only a few days to occupy Afghanistan. They
installed a puppet ruler, Babrak Karmal. Moscow proclaimed it had invaded
Afghanistan to "liberate" it from "feudalism and Islamic extremism" and
"nests of terrorists and bandits."

Soviet propaganda churned out films of Red Army soldiers playing with
children, building schools, dispensing medical care. Afghan women were to be
liberated from the veil and other backward Islamic customs. The Soviet Union
and its local communist allies would bring Afghanistan into the 20th
century.

Two years later, Afghans had risen against their Soviet "liberators" and
were waging a low-intensity guerrilla war. Unable to control the
countryside, Moscow poured more troops into Afghanistan. The Soviet-run
Afghan Army had poor morale and less fighting zeal. The KGB-run Afghan
secret police, KhAD, jailed and savagely tortured tens of thousands of
"Islamic terrorists," then called "freedom fighters" in the West.

Fast forward to December, 2002, and a disturbing sense of deja vu. A new
foreign army has easily occupied Afghanistan, overthrown the "feudal"
Taliban government and installed a puppet regime in Kabul. Western media
churn out the same rosy, agitprop stories the Soviets did about liberating
Afghanistan, freeing women, educating children. The only real difference is
that kids in today’s TV clips are waving American instead of Soviet flags.
The invaders have changed; the propaganda remains the same.

America’s invasion of Afghanistan in October, 2001, was billed as an epic
military victory and the model of future imperial expeditions to pacify
Third World malefactors. Since then, news about this war-ravaged land has
grown scarce. America’s limited attention has turned elsewhere.

Afghanistan in chaos

In fact, America’s Afghan adventure has gotten off to as poor a start as
that of the Soviet Union. The U.S.-installed ruler of Kabul, veteran CIA
asset Hamid Karzai, must be protected from his own people by up to 200 U.S.
bodyguards. Much of Afghanistan is in chaos, fought over by feuding warlords
and drug barons.

There are almost daily attacks on U.S. occupation forces. My old
mujahedin sources say U.S. casualties and equipment losses in Afghanistan
are far higher than Washington is reporting — and are rising.

American troops are operating from the old Soviet bases at Bagram and
Shindand, retaliating, like the Soviets, against Mujahedin attacks on U.S.
forces by heavily bombing nearby villages. The CIA is trying to assassinate
Afghan nationalist leaders opposed to the Karzai regime in Kabul, in
particular my old acquaintance Gulbadin Hekmatyar.

North of the Hindu Kush mountains, America’s Afghan ally, the Tajik-Uzbek
Northern Alliance, has long been a proxy of the Russians. The chief of the
Russian general staff and head of intelligence directed the Alliance in its
final attack on the Taliban last fall. Russia then supplied Alliance forces
with $100 million in arms, and is providing $85 million worth of
helicopters, tanks, artillery and spare parts, as well as military advisors
and technicians. Russia now dominates much of northern Afghanistan.

The Taliban, according to the United Nations drug agency, had almost shut
down opium-morphine-heroin production. America’s ally, the Northern
Alliance, has revived the illicit trade. Since the U.S. overthrew the
Taliban, opium cultivation has soared from 185 tons a year to 2,700. The
Northern Alliance, which dominates the Kabul regime, finances its
arms-buying and field operations with drug money. President George Bush’s
war on drugs collided with his war on terrorism — and lost. The U.S. is now,
in effect, colluding in the heroin trade.

Anti-American Afghan forces — the Taliban, al-Qaida, and others — have
regrouped and are mounting ever larger attacks on U.S. troops and, reports
the UN, even reopening training camps. Taliban mujahedin are using the same
sophisticated early alert system they developed to monitor Soviet forces in
the 1980s to warn of American search-and-destroy missions before they leave
base. As a result, U.S. troops keep chasing shadows. Canadians fared no
better.

In the sole major battle since the Taliban’s overthrow, Operation
Anaconda, U.S. forces were bested by veteran Afghan mujahedin, losing two
helicopters.

The ongoing cost of Afghan operations is a closely guarded secret.
Earlier this year, the cost of stationing 8,000 American troops, backed by
warplanes and naval units, was estimated at $5 billion US monthly!

The CIA spends millions every month to bribe Pushtun warlords.

Costs will rise as the U.S. expands bases in Afghanistan and neighbouring
Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan — all placed along the
planned U.S.-owned pipeline that will bring Central Asian oil south through
Afghanistan.

The UN reports the Taliban and al-Qaida on the offensive, Afghan women
remain veiled and the country is in a dangerous mess. Declaring victory in
Afghanistan may have been premature.